U. of Colorado, Denver librarian Jeffery Beall has been mentioned a couple of time on infoDOCKET lately. We first shared a post about him and his work to shed light on predatory/questionable open access publishers when he was featured in a NY Times article last month.

Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Beall is being threatened with a $1 billion lawsuit by OMICS Publishing Group, an OA publisher based in India (with an office in Los Angeles) that he has posted about on his Scholarly Open Access blog.

The OMICS Group’s practices have received particular attention from Mr. Beall and some publications, including The Chronicle. In 2012, The Chronicle found that the group was listing 200 journals, but only about 60 percent had actually published anything. The owner of OMICS, Srinu Babu Gedela, said then that his company was not a “predatory publisher” and was ramping up to be a “leading player in making science open access.” IP Markets said OMICS was started six years ago and has 500 employees.

On his blog, Mr. Beall accuses OMICS of spamming scholars with invitations to publish, quickly accepting their papers, then charging them a nearly $3,000 publishing fee after a paper has been accepted.

U.S. Department of HHS and OMICS

Last week we shared an in-depth report (that included a comment from Beall) that OMICS was recently sent a letter by a U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services (the department that run NIH and NLM) lawyer for using the names, “National Institutes of Health (NIH), its Institutes, PubMed Central, or the names of NIH employees in an erroneous and/or misleading manner” on their website.

Full Text of OMICS Letter to Beall

Beall has give infoDOCKET/Library Journal permission to share the full text of the letter that OMICS sent him. It’s embedded below.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.